


The outskirts of Robotropolis

by themostneontwig



Category: Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comic), Sonic the Hedgehog (Comics), Sonic the Hedgehog - All Media Types
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Pre-super genesis wave, it had a terrible sponsor: my short attention span, this fic was brought to you by quarantine boredom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:15:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25056808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themostneontwig/pseuds/themostneontwig
Summary: Jules finds himself in a very different world
Kudos: 11





	The outskirts of Robotropolis

The world snapped into view quickly, and Jules instantly realised something was wrong. He could tell he was lying on his back but... he couldn’t feel anything. The texture of what he was lying on, the temperature, nothing. No feeling whatsoever.   
….Where was he?   
The sky was dark, cloudy, filled with smog. There were buildings on the horizon, factories by the look of it, and a lot of them. Cautiously, the hedgehog pulled himself up into a sitting position to observe his surroundings. ...Something seemed slightly off about that action to him, the way his body moved felt...unright. Heaps of metal and broken mechanical devices were piled on either side of him, behind him, in front of him. Some of it was rusting, some of it looked like it had been recently thrown out. He was in a scrap yard? Why?   
Jules thought, hard. What was the last thing he remembered?   
_The sound of a gunshot. Intense pain. Falling.The world fading to black._

He cursed in his head. It didn’t make sense to him. The scrap yard he was currently in wasn’t the same place from his last memory, so how did he get here? He couldn’t feel any wounds, and yet if he hadn’t been injured, why could he recall a burning pain in the back of his head so vividly? He went to touch where he recalled the pain being, only to move his hand away with shock after he heard something strange. As his hand touched his quill, he heard a metallic clink, akin to the noise one might hear when putting cutlery together. Curiosity compelled him to touch it again. Maybe the sound had just been something in the scrap yard. He tapped on his quill a few more times. More metallic noises.

The confusion eventually prompted him to stare down at his hands. And keep staring at them. For a very long time.   
Those... those weren’t **his** hands, were they?   
As opposed to his usual white gloves, the hands in front of him were bare, grey, and seemingly made of metal. Robotic. He had robotic hands.  
Except it wasn’t just his hands.  
Jules’ eyes were caught on what were once his wrists, now replaced by mechanical blue cylinders, traveling half way up his arms, where, once they ended, metal, grey pipes took their place. The pipes, oddly enough, were segmented, perhaps to make them more flexible. His torso and legs revealed more of the same. Blue and grey robotic parts. He pressed a hand to his face. The noise the action made was more than enough to tell him that that too was made of metal.

He’d been transformed into a robot. Part his mind screamed out in disbelief, trying to convince him this was all a dream, but something inside him could tell it wasn’t. No, this felt too grounded, too real, and much too vivid to be a dream. Jules continued to stare at his hands, opening and closing them a few times, over and over. His mind raced, desperately searching, trying to come up with an explanation for everything that had happened to him. After a few moments, a memory resurfaced and slapped him in the face. 

_“What’re you working on in here Charles?”  
Jules entered his brother’s workshop, and made his way over to Charles, to get a look at what he was making. Charles spun around to talk to his brother, looking excited. “Something that’ll hopefully be revolutionary, Jules!” He held up a blueprint, showing off the plans for the device. “These are plans for my newest project, the medical roboticiser.”  
“Medical roboticiser?”  
“Mhmm. It’ll turn organic things robotic.”  
“Oh? What’re you going to use it for?”  
“Helping people. The sick, the injured, the elderly, people like that.”_

A device that could turn injured people into robots. Some of the pieces started to come together, but that still didn’t explain where he was or how he got there. The countless factories in the horizon weren’t familiar to him, and he didn’t know of anywhere with a scrap yard this big. Only one way to find out where he was, he supposed. He got to his feet, and began to look around. The more he moved, the more **off** he realised he felt. His movements felt unnatural, different. He knew he was walking, but there was no feeling in his feet, almost as if they were extremely numb. 

After a few minutes of aimless wandering with no progress in getting any clues as to where he was, a sound came to his attention. Footsteps. Then a voice.  
“Jules!”  
The hedgehog whipped around at the sound of his name. In the distance, he spotted a familiar looking figure in the distance. It looked like... his brother? Oh finally, a familiar face! But as the figure grew closer, it became more and more apparent that something was wrong. The first thing that threw him off was Charles’ eyes. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but they looked as if they were bright red. His movements seemed oddly stiff, and again, perhaps the light was deceiving him, but Charles looked strangely...shiny. As he got even closer, Jules saw exactly what was ‘wrong’. His brother was a robot too. 

The metal Charles was now made from was strangely muted in colour, and his eyes were now black, with red pupils, glowing faintly. A rather uneasy and unsettling sight, Jules thought.   
“Charles?”  
Oh chaos, was that his voice? It did sound like him, just rather...synthesised.   
“Oh thank goodness, you’re yourself!” the robian sounded extremely relieved, though Jules couldn’t tell why. Why wouldn’t he be himself?  
“Charles, what’s going on? Why are we here, why are you and I-”  
“Not now. I’ll explain on the way, but we need to get moving.” Charles cut his brother off, “come with me.”  
Jules hesitated for a second, perhaps still trying to process the rather surreal situation he had found himself in before agreeing. “Ok. Lead the way.”

Charles began to lead the way to wherever they were going, whilst beginning to explain the situation as they walked.   
“This whole predicament started when you were shot in the head,” Charles explained. Jules nodded. “I think I remember that, actually. Or at least what happened right before that.”  
“Ok, good.” Charles continued the story. “After that, you were unconscious. But your wounds were fatal. You weren’t going to make it through the night at that rate. So I..” Charles trailed off, before picking back up. “So I used the roboticiser on you, to try and save your life. And even though you’re here now, you weren’t exactly you at first. You were a mindless machine to put it bluntly….” The last sentence was heavy with guilt, and trailed off into silence. Jules paused, taking everything he had just heard in, before asking “ok, but what about you?”  
“What do you mean?”  
“How come you’re a robot too?”  
“Ah.” The older of the two brothers looked lost in thought for a second, before continuing. “When Julian saw what had happened to you, he realised he could use the roboticiser for a very different purpose than the one it was intended for. Amassing an army of slaves to assist in his takeover.”  
“Takeover?”  
“...The madman practically owns the world. What you’re looking at are the outskirts of Robotropolis, which you would’ve once known as Mobotropolis. It’s almost become his centre of operations.”   
“And everyone is a robotic slave?”  
“Not everyone, no. There are those like us, who’s minds are free, and not quite everyone was caught in the takeover.”   
The two walked silently for a while after that, Jules taking everything in. A madman in power, and nearly everyone was enslaved. He looked up at the sky again, dull, grey, not a ray of sunshine in sight. The world seemed to have changed so drastically since he was last conscious. 

“One more question, Charles.”  
“What is it?”  
“What was I doing in a scrap yard?”  
“You didn’t react too well when your mind was freed. Robotnik tried to get you back under his control but seemed to give up on that idea.”  
Charles glanced off to the side awkwardly. “You weren’t alone there for too long, were you?”  
“In the scrap yard? I was only awake for a few minutes before you found me,” Jules reassured.   
“Good,” Charles murmured somewhat absentmindedly, before raising his voice again. “We’re here.”

Jules looked around. He didn’t really see where ‘here’ was, it seemed to be a small, dark alleyway in between factories. Charles on the other hand, was bending down, and lifting something off of the ground. Upon closer inspection Jules realised his brother was...opening a way into the sewers? “Come on,” Charles jumped down, with Jules following closely behind him. They crept through the sewers, until they reached a room, sealed behind a ‘no entry’ sign. “Well this is it”, Charles opened the door for his brother, letting him wander inside. The room was a bit messy, various supplies, tools, books, maps, so on scattered everywhere. But that wasn’t what caught Jules’ eye, no, instead he was focused on a figure sitting in the corner. It was hard to tell, because she’d changed a lot upon being roboticised, but the purple metal and ‘hair’ gave it away to him. Bernadette. 

She’d noticed him too, it would seem, as she had gotten up and began to walk over to him. Charles stepped back a bit, allowing the two some space to reunite.   
“Jules, is that-”  
“Me? Yeah, hello.”   
A moment of silence came before Bernie stepped forwards and placed her arms round him. Jules returned the action cautiously, still a little unused to being robotic.   
“It’s good to see you again, Jules. Wonderful, actually. I’m sure Charles filled you in, but...we thought we’d lost you.”  
“I know,” he replied quietly, at a loss for what else to say. He could only imagine what it must’ve been like for the other two, when he was presumed dead. And a large part of him didn’t want to. Imagining scenarios with his loved ones grieving for him was not something he fancied doing. 

....His loved ones…

Juels’ eyes scanned the room quickly, but him, Charles and Bernadette were the only ones there. So where was…  
“What happened to Maurice?” Jules asked, suddenly very aware that his son had not been mentioned a single time since he awoke. Charles chuckled slightly. “Don’t worry, the boy’s still alive, and still flesh and blood at that. He and his friends have become quite the thorn in Robotnik’s side over the past few years.”   
The last sentence caused Jules to give his brother a perplexed look. There was a pause, before Bernie glanced at Charles with a questioning expression. “You did tell him how long it’s been, right?”   
“It may have slipped my mind-”  
“Wait, how long has it been then?”   
“You were roboticised ten years ago, Jules.”

Oh.  
That sudden piece of information came crashing down on Jules out of nowhere.   
**Ten years.**  
Ten years of essentially being unconscious.   
“So that means Maurice is 15 now?”  
“Yep.”   
An overwhelming sense of guilt hit the robian, hard. Not that it was his fault, but he couldn’t help but feel bad about not being there for his son. Did the boy even still remember him? He really hoped so. He really, really hoped so.   
“Can I see him again?”  
“All in due time,” Charles announced. “But for now, we’ve got a job to do. Though a word of advice for when you do see him again. He prefers the name ‘Sonic’ now.”

**Author's Note:**

> i cant tell if this pacing in this fic is bad or not, but if it is then i apologize


End file.
